Who Is Responsible For Accidents On School Trips?

Unfortunately, accidents sometimes occur on school trips, which can range from minor injuries to quite serious incidents. And the important question of responsibility arises. Who is Responsible? Eleven? The teachers? The place you visit?

Both staff and owners of training centers have a great responsibility to do everything they can to prevent accidents on school trips and to do everything they can to avoid injuries to children. In this article, we will discuss activities during the school day, leisure activities and other types of excursions and school trips.

From the time parents leave their children at school, the school assumes the responsibility to take care of them while they are on the school premises or at other activities under its auspices.

Accidents at school are often due to the nature of the activity and to children’s sometimes unpredictable behavior. Supervision from teachers is the key in these situations.

Unfortunately, there are cases where these accidents occur due to lack of supervision on the part of teachers, whether it occurs in primary school, high school or university. And in these cases, whether the accidents are more or less serious, the institution must take responsibility for its negligence.

We will look more deeply at this problem to gain a better understanding of who is responsible for accidents on school trips.

Risk of accidents on school trips

When a school organizes a trip or a study visit, the risks of an accident are much higher than during the normal activities that take place on their own premises.

Because school trips take place outside the school, it is not always possible to control all the dangers and risks that may arise. These can occur during the trip there or back and also during the actual activities that take place during the day.

Liability in the event of accidents on school trips

This risk of injury or accidents is manifold when there are a large number of students and not enough teachers who look after them and monitor them. For students who have some form of disability, it is even more important that they are supervised.

What can parents do in the event of an accident during an outing?

In the event of accidents on school trips, the parents can demand compensation from the school in civil law. But they also have the opportunity to do so in court. This is reasonable in the event of a claim for liability from a public school.

Parents can claim that the school has a liability for lack of supervision, both against school staff and their management. The teachers, authorities and staff of the training center must prove that they have taken all appropriate and necessary measures to avoid the accident.

Two known cases of accidents during a school trip

The mother of a 16-year-old girl with a mental disability filed a claim for damages for an accident that occurred during a school trip to a nature center.

During a walk, the girl fell into a river that resulted in a severe brain injury and a crack in her spine. The consequences of these injuries were that the girl became paralyzed and received very serious visible injuries.

The court acquitted the two teachers responsible for the group of students that day. In fact, it was the nature center that was prosecuted in this case when it was shown that she accompanied the walk without the center having informed the teachers.

In this case, the fault lay with the owners of the center. The damages they were forced to pay were close to $1 million.

A visit to the zoo

The second case occurred during a visit by a group of children to the zoo, when a lion attacked a four-year-old boy. The court ruled that the school was responsible this time.

It was shown that the accident was due to a lack of supervision, attention and vigilance from the school staff who were responsible for the group of children during the trip.

However, this does not mean that the zoo’s management was released from its share of responsibility. In order to defend its judgment, the court took into account that the child was only four years old. Due to the presence of animals, they should have been more careful and more preventive measures should have been taken.